


The Assassin and The Aquarist

by Kateyfish (014469)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Animal Transformation, Art, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2018, Getting Together, Inspired by Art, M/M, Meet-fishy, NSFW Art, No Smut, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Science, axolotls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 16:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14937920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/014469/pseuds/Kateyfish
Summary: When Doctor Abraham Erskine disappears after an assassination attempt on his life, leaving behind only a pile of clothes, Steve is left to care for his fish. Little does he know that the assassin responsible for Abe's disappearance is closer than he thinks...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the beautiful art from [Pathulu](https://pathulu.tumblr.com/) which will be embedded into the text. Beta'd by the absolutely marvellous [Raven](https://ravenclawwitch18.tumblr.com/) who did a really last-minute turnaround after I forgot the meaning of the word 'chill' and could not stop playing with the ending.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the casual observer, Doctor Abraham Erskine lived an ordinary, routine sort of life. Every morning, he woke up the second his alarm sounded, ate a light breakfast of toast with raspberry jam while grumbling to his tabby cat, Colonel Phillips, about the latest news headlines, and drove his modest car to work. So far, so normal. 
> 
> When he arrived at work, however, the veneers of mundanity fell away from him and he became Dr Erskine, one of the foremost geneticists of his time and a man whose bland life carefully concealed the secret, life-changing research he conducted.

The Winter Soldier was pulled up into consciousness in the same way that he had been many times before. On some level, he was sure that the white-lit lab and blank faces covered by dust masks were familiar, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint where from. Regardless, he had a job to do. The Soldier only ever served one purpose. He was shown a photograph of an older man. The photo was plain, white background – an ID badge photo, he thought. Underneath the photo, the man’s name read “Dr Abraham Erskine.”  
########

To the casual observer, Doctor Abraham Erskine lived an ordinary, routine sort of life. Every morning, he woke up the second his alarm sounded, ate a light breakfast of toast with raspberry jam while grumbling to his tabby cat, Colonel Phillips, about the latest news headlines, and drove his modest car to work. So far, so normal. 

When he arrived at work, however, the veneers of mundanity fell away from him and he became Dr Erskine, one of the foremost geneticists of his time and a man whose bland life carefully concealed the secret, life-changing research he conducted. The shared lab in which he ostensibly worked was the same as any lab you’ll find in any research institution. Narrow, wipe-clean benches permanently stained with chemicals from old experiments ran the length of the room, divided here and there into sections marked out with masking tape and ‘Keep Out!!!!’ scrawled in Sharpie despite the fact that it was meant to be a shared space. At the end of the benches were collections of mugs and bowls containing various cultures of mould and what probably used to be someone’s wife’s lasagne, indicating that various university faculty members had defied the ‘No Human Food’ signs hung on every door. The air filtration system which kept them all from inhaling chemical fumes was old and noisy, but the grating hum had long since become nothing more than soothing background noise to the long-tenured denizens of the lab. The ‘No Human Food’ fridge in the corner, and the other one labelled ‘Biological Samples Only,’ which had at first seemed slightly sinister now had become just another part of his work life. They were forever freezing up and having to be defrosted by the most junior research assistant, usually a very keen and slightly-too-intense summer intern. The only thing, in fact, which made this lab different from any other lab was the floor –to – ceiling research aquarium, which was used for keeping what Erskine thought determinedly of as the ‘test subjects’ for their research. Noisy Amazonian frogs, darting zebra fish, oozing black sea urchins and pale axolotls, all the usual test subjects for genetic testing, were housed in this aquarium, and although Abraham had hated it at first, having the test subjects overlooking the lab, he now found the way that the light filtered through the green water quite soothing. It helped to give the place a calm, ordinary look that Abraham relied on to keep the lab’s true contents a secret. 

Behind a sliding panel in the shared genetics lab, its existence known only to a handful of people and accessible only via fingerprint-scanner concealed within a box of latex gloves, was the Erskine Lab, or as he fondly referred to it, home. It was here in his lab, behind a security system built by Tony Stark himself, that Abraham Erskine worked on a secret formula – to cure mortality itself. This lab was different to the bland, over-lit lab just on the other side of the wall. Abraham’s benches were permanently covered with all sorts of equipment, vials of liquid and old notebooks. That was one of the major benefits of having a secret lab, he often thought – no Health and Safety inspections. The stack of notebooks which contained all his research – because he did not trust the university computing system, and besides, he couldn’t get a decent WiFi signal in here anyway – were balanced on his desk, and under his desk, stuffed behind his desk and even propped up his desk where it had fallen away in that one corner. After all, he had been working on this formula for the better part of thirty years. He was going to change the world one day, he just knew it. He was so close to perfecting his formula – he was going to help so many people with long-term illnesses. He just had to keep all his research safe and secret from – well, the less said about… them… the better. 

No-one in his lab was aware of how close Abraham had come to completing an immortality serum, not even his most suspicious grad student, and Abraham had gone to great pains to keep it that way. It wasn’t hard, as the people who actually used the lab on a day-to-day basis were few. Older professors who came in to avoid marking term papers, a few grad students with identical exhausted faces and clothes full of holes. Then there was the young man who came in to clean the fish tanks every day and seemed to spend more time chatting – chatting!! – with the test subjects than doing actual work. Steven, his name was. Scrawny young Steve Rogers with the skinny arms and the crooked smile, always whistling or singing away while he cleaned the tanks, changed the water filters and made sure that the fish – the test subjects – were happy and healthy in accordance with the university’s code of ethics. Steve even talked to Abraham while he worked, and out of all the people with whom he shared a lab, Steve the aquarist was the only person who treated Abe like a friend. 

Smiling at the memory of Steve’s sharp tongue and witty attitude, Abe set to work. 

 

It would have been a normal, everyday Wednesday for Abe, if it weren’t for the Inspectors. Or rather, the people who said they were Inspectors. Two men dressed in identical black suits claiming to be from the university health and safety board entered the shared lab, their ID badges shiny and new and with identical black clipboards in hand. They both smiled at him, and that alone made Abe suspicious because the university health and safety inspectors were renowned for being a miserable bunch and in fact no one had seen them smile for at least a decade. The second thing that tipped Abe off to the falsity of the inspectors were that they kept on asking to see the “other lab” which they thought was inside the shared lab. They had it on their plans, they were sure that it was meant to be right here. Abe’s ears pricked up and his heart beat a little faster when the taller man with a wide smile and a hand on his shoulder asked him loudly how to get into the “other lab” and seemed not to take Abe’s dumb-clueless act at face value. It was all Abe could do to keep his eyes from darting to the false wall in the supply cupboard and the fake box of gloves that concealed the Erskine Lab, and as soon as the “inspectors” left he dived to the door and triple-checked that nothing had given him away. Sighing with relief, Abe straightened his tie and got back to work, hoping that the strange men would give up and that would be the end of that. 

 

That was not, however, the end of it. Three more times in that week strange men turned up at the lab trying to get into the secret room. On Thursday afternoon, a new centrifuge was mysteriously delivered, and the sharp-faced porter with the shiny new name badge had apparently been informed that he had to put the new centrifuge in the “other lab”. Abe sent him off with an apology that he had been given bad instructions, but there was no other lab here and there was no-one whose name matched that on the delivery instructions. So sad, such a waste of his time, bloody pencil-pushers in the admin office had mixed it all up again oh dear. Then, two hours later, a huge, muscular man claiming to be from IT support came to “fix the computer in the other lab”. Again, his name badge was shiny and new-looking, and again, Abe sent him off with a smile and an apology. 

 

On Friday morning when Abe walked into the lab there was a sign on the lab door claiming that it was being fumigated and that no-one was allowed inside for four hours. That was the last straw. Abe tried to enter the lab only to find that the door was locked. He knocked once, politely, on the off chance that this was a legitimate issue, his heart beating in his throat the entire time. He had increased his knocking from ‘polite’ to ‘insistent’ when Steve came down the corridor, cup of coffee in hand and whistling along to a song in his earphones. 

 

‘What’s this?’ Steve asked curiously. ‘Lab doesn’t need to be fumigated, it was only done last month. Have they even – Hey!’ Steve banged on the door, angry now. ‘Have you even moved the animals out of there? Hey! Open up!’ 

Steve took off his coat and bag and shoved his coffee cup to the floor. Putting his skinny shoulder to the door, Steve shoved but it didn’t give way until Abe also set his shoulder to the door. Dimly, Abe could hear someone on their phone in the background. Inside the lab standing against the back wall were three men in Hazmat suits and aspirators holding large gas tanks. 

 

‘Hey assholes! At least take the fish out of the room before you start spraying chemicals around in there!’ Steve yelled at the men, two of whom looked at one another in confusion. The third man stayed silent and still against the wall. 

‘Who authorised this fumigation?’ Abe demanded, placated a little now that he could see that his secret was still safe but still with the echoes of terror in his blood. 

 

One of the workers took of his mask and handed over a work order while Steve started filling the portable water tanks and counting out the test subjects into their temporary home. Abe smiled at Steve’s practicality for a moment. The work order, like the repair order the day before, had been authorised by someone with a name Abe didn’t recognise – the name of Jasper Sitwell. Probably another shiny-new name badge. Unfortunately for him, however, the work order bore the stamp of the Dean’s office, which meant it was legitimate and stopping the work would be a tall order. Reluctantly, Abe handed the order back to the worker and nodded at him. The worker placed his Hazmat hood back on and wandered back over to his companions. 

 

‘Take five, boys. We should let them move the animals.’

 

Two of the workers sighed with relief as they removed their suits and headed out of the door, but the third one, the man who had reacted to their entry with calm and silence, kept his mask in place and stared at Abe for a long moment before stalking past him and out of the lab. As the man passed, Abe felt a cold shiver run through his body. 

He had to think quickly – this was serious. The mysterious deliveries, the bogus IT calls and now an attempt to shut him out all pointed to someone powerful having got wind of his experiments and somehow managed to locate his lab. Abe knew he needed to lay low and keep everything safe while this mess got sorted out, but all he wanted to do was clear out his lab and run. Perhaps his – funders – would understand if he killed the project for a few days, unable to shake the sense of menace that lurked in the eyes of that silent third man and had followed him around all week. Still though, if he was going to lay low for a while, he would still need someone to come in and feed the test subjects. Perhaps Steve would – no. Putting Steve in danger was something that Abe was not yet prepared to do. 

Abe knew he had to act quickly. He sent Steve out of the lab in search of more tanks and swiftly opened the door to his secret lab, looking over his shoulder as he did so. Once inside, Abe packed up his laptop, notebooks and as much information as he could into his backpack and was out of the door within thirty seconds. Just in the nick of time, he closed the door to the lab behind him and swung around as Steve came clanging back into the room. Without saying another word or making eye contact, Abe strode out of the lab. He knew exactly the route to take. First, he headed to the tiny office he shared with three other members of staff, swearing his thanks under his breath when he found it empty. He searched in his desk draw until his fingers closed around the tiny killstick that his – funders – had given him if he ever needed to hide his research. He inserted the drive into his old desktop computer and watched as the screen blanked. The hard-drive should now have been completely unusable, but Abe unplugged it from the wall and took out the power cable for good measure. He emptied the contents of his desk drawers into the large stab-proof sports bag he kept under his desk. His colleagues thought it was a gym bag, never mind that Abe had never been seen in the university gym in all the years he’d had tenure. Finally, he made sure that there was nothing in the desk that looked unusual to the casual observer. The desktop just looked like it had been turned off, his drawers were closed as usual and he was never one to keep personal photos or anything like that on his desk anyway – too many prying eyes – so that it looked like he’d just not been in here for a few days. Tossing the killstick into the trash by his neighbour’s desk, Abe nodded once and walked out the door, intending to hole up in his house for at least a week and protect as much of his research as he could. He would have to lie low or risk his research being exposed and falling into the wrong hands. 

As Abe Erskine walked to where his car was parked in the university lot, he didn’t notice a shadowy figure watching him leave.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve Rogers had been sent home from work early – again. This time, though, it was not because one of his many illnesses had reared their ugly heads for the millionth time, nor was it because he had been reported for ‘belligerence’ for the – ugh, million and first time. As Steve crossed the road to where his dilapidated apartment building slouched over the street, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sent home from work because there was a safety issue in the lab. This, he thought, was a little concerning. As Steve unlocked the front door and began the laborious journey up seven flights of stairs, he mentally cursed the landlord for not fixing the elevator as he had done every day for the past six weeks. His asthmatic lungs could barely hold out for six flights, but at least the mindless climb took his thoughts off his worries about the lab. 

 

Half an hour after he had wheezed through the door like he was trying to blow it open with just his breath, showered and curled up on the couch with a cup of herbal tea, Steve’s mind drifted back to the morning. It was so unlike Erskine to get flustered, especially by something as minor as unscheduled maintenance work. Erskine had rescued Steve from the HR guy’s droning tour on his first day in the job, taken him under his wing and introduced him to the captivating aquaria for which Steve would become responsible. Erskine had always been kind to Steve, even when he struggled, telling him that he believed in him, that with Steve, as with the animals, it was what’s on the inside that counts. Of course, Steve thought that Abe was probably talking about DNA not heart, but he could dream. Before this week, Steve would have confidently told anyone who’d listen that Abraham Erskine was one of the most calm, pragmatic men he knew. After this week, though, he might have to rethink that. The look on Erskine’s face hadn’t just been annoyance at the repairs, Steve mused to himself as he sipped his tea. It had almost looked like the man was… scared of something. He hoped everything was alright, as Abe had become more of a friend than a co-worker to Steve over the past year. 

Steve smiled at the memory. 

In his pocket, his phone rang – Erskine. 

‘Steven – there’s no time to explain. I think – ah, dammit. How soon can you get here?’

 

Steve sat up straight as soon as he heard the panic in Abe’s voice.

 

‘Abe? What’s wrong? How soon can I get where? To work?’

 

‘To my house, Steve, there’s – ah! There’s something I need to tell you, something very important, but you have to be quick. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left before I-’

 

The call cut out. Steve stared down at the phone screen, a sense of dread mounting inside him. He called Abe back, but as the call rang and rang without being picked up, the dread in Steve’s chest rose up into the back of his throat and he knew he needed to act quickly. Throwing on his coat and boots, Steve barely remembered to grab his keys as he ran out of the door. 

########

Abraham Erskine stared in horror as the shadow of a man crossed in front of his window. From where he was pressed against the back wall of his house, phone clutched uselessly in one hand, he could only watch helplessly as the muzzle of a gun tapped on the glass before a gloved fist, unnaturally strong, punched straight through the wood of his front door, and turned the handle. 

#######

The Soldier’s mission was clear. Get in; find the formula; get out. Maximum intimidation, maximum force if necessary. He broke the wooden door panel with ease, twisting the handle behind it. A part of him wondered at the trusting stupidity of civilians, but years of training – conditioning? – squashed that down. As his handlers had said there would be, the door immediately on his left led to a narrow kitchen, which – ok, his handlers had not mentioned this. What was once a normal kitchen seemed to have been recently turned into a haphazard laboratory. The oven door was fully open and the scant light from within showed a row of petri dishes slowly baking in the low heat. On the bench top, the toaster had been unplugged from the wall and was now serving as a sort of stand for a notebook, covered in spidery writing and wedged open with an empty box labelled ‘Legs - walking.’ Next to the book, ‘Legs – jumping’ lay open and spilling out. A large fish tank full of murky water and sleek movement provided a little extra light. There were two fridges humming in discordant effort, one labelled ‘Human Food Only’ and the other, rather ominously, labelled ‘Test Subjects Only.’ Shelves which should have held food and plates were stacked high with jars and bottles with only crude drawings of animals where the labels should be, nothing else. 

 

The soldier paused. This was outside the mission parameters. There was supposed to be one single container holding the vials which his handlers wished him to retrieve. It was supposed to be an easy mission, so he had not been allowed to know what the vial would look like. 

 

Before the soldier could decide how to proceed, he was struck in the back of the head with a heavy object. The soldier turned on his heel and delivered a lightning-fast blow to whomever had struck him. Reeling back, his assailant grunted in pain and the soldier advanced on him, flipping a knife out of its hidden sheath and into his hand. Cloaked in darkness, he did not know who was attacking him but it seemed as though whoever it was had frozen in fear. Suddenly, the twin electrified legs of a Taser jumped out at the soldier as he moved, electricity arcing towards his chest. He danced backwards, a sudden irrational fear of electric shocks making him careless. In his haste to get away, the soldier tripped backwards over the open oven door and went sprawling into the wall, his metal arm coming down hard on the bench to steady himself. From above him on the bench-top, glass cracked and the soldier remembered the countless, anonymous vials of liquid as his shoulder hit the floor. Disrupted by his arm, the glass vials ran off the bench-top and crashed down around him. The soldier realised that the fish-tank must have been hit as well, as his body was soaked and a heavy glass corner pounded painfully into his ribs. The soldier cried out again as one final vial hit the bridge of his nose and shattered, sending shards of glass and cool, clear liquid into his mouth, nose and eyes. 

 

‘Keep still!’ came a sudden, softly German-accented voice from across the kitchen but the soldier, half-blinded by the glass and fear of whatever liquid he had swallowed, did not hear him. 

 

A nameless fear gripped him - something very wrong was happening. His vision blurred and the sounds coming from his own mouth were foreign to his ears. Breathing became nigh-impossible and his skin felt tight, stretched and shiny like a sausage on a flame. Around him, dark walls rose up and the soldier sank into them, too late to grab his gun as his arms would no longer reach the holsters. Pain, far worse than anything he had ever known, ripped through his left shoulder as his whole prosthetic arm suddenly increased in weight tenfold. The sick smells of old blood and diseased flesh hit his nose, overwhelming him, but when he tried to access the arm to perform maintenance, he found that his body would not move for him. The tightness in his skin kept growing, drying him out like a rag hung in front of a fire. It was too dry! His skin craved wetness but the burning in his lungs – which seemed to have migrated to somewhere behind his ears? – was too great to let him move. From his metal arm there came the shriek of metal scraping against metal, and the arm finally started to feel a normal weight again, but by that time it was too late. Suffocating, paralysed and helpless, the soldier lay down in the middle of his nest of darkness and prepared to die. 

#####

Steve knew something was wrong the second he set foot on Erskine’s front path. Up the driveway, the front door was ajar, and as Steve ran towards it, he could see that there was a large, splintered hole where the lock should be. Steve spared himself one moment to acknowledge his fear before he squared his small shoulders and tiptoed into the house. It was dark inside, no sign of anyone at home, but from the kitchen on his left came an ominous dripping sound. 

 

‘Doctor Erskine? Abe?’ Steve called out, only half hoping that he would be heard. 

If whoever had destroyed the front door was still around, Steve did not want to be here when they found him. Underneath the fear, though, was an undercurrent of anger. Who had dared to break into the house of Steve’s friend? It was this anger that propelled him into the kitchen on a sudden gush of breath, feeling a little silly that he had been creeping around when he realised that the kitchen was empty. 

Steve flicked on the light and gasped at the scene before him. It was chaos – the kitchen table was pushed up against the wall and one of the chairs had had its legs broken. Erskine’s benches were covered in broken glass and pondweed, and Steve guessed that the fish tank had smashed. The dripping that he’d heard was the contents of the fish tank slowly emptying themselves from the bench to the floor, which was covered in broken glass. Dead fish lay scattered around, their eyes glassy and their poor bodies bloated. The most strange thing, in this middle of all this, was the set of men’s clothing, leather straps and guns that lay in front of the open oven door. There was even a pair of heavy black boots that looked like they’d been kicked off in a hurry, one lying flat under the oven and the other flung into a corner. Those guns, the chair and the poor dead fish put together told a story that Steve was trying his hardest not to think about, but it seemed like there was no other explanation. Someone had broken in, there had been a struggle in the kitchen, and then the mystery burglars had vanished into the night with Erskine as their hostage. But where did the men’s clothes fit into this? Steve had certainly never seen Erskine wearing so much leather as was now strewn about the room. And why was there so much university equipment around here? Now that Steve was over his initial shock, he recognised one of Erskine’s notebooks, some samples, a centrifuge that he’d spent hours searching for last week, and a large bag full of fish food. Steve even thought he could make out some of the ‘test subjects’ from his aquaria at the university among the casualties littering the kitchen floor. 

 

Steve picked his way through the glass towards the ruined notebook, hoping that it might illuminate why Erskine had called him here, why he had vanished, but as he moved closer, something in the pile of clothing caught his eye – a pair of boots, still with the socks slumped down inside them. 

 

Irrational fear flooded Steve’s veins. Finding a dismembered corpse, or part of one, was far worse than anything else in here, and Steve’s brain helpfully supplied him with all the ways that this could go wrong for him. As his fear spike receded, Steve could see now that it was not in fact a dismembered corpse, nor was there any sign of another human in the kitchen. As he leaned to touch it, he saw a lone mudfish wriggling around, inches from the prosthetic’s severed shoulder socket. Steve immediately scooped the fish up, holding him in his hand for only long enough to grab a miraculously-unshattered glass and plop the little guy inside it before filling it with tap water. Not perfect, but it would have to do. 

Steve held the glass up to the window. 

‘You’re an axolotl,’ he murmured. 

Erskine kept axolotl in the tanks at work, but Steve had never seen one with markings like this before. It was pink like a piglet, and across its belly, the little mudfish had patches that looked almost like human abdominal muscles. Around its head where its respiratory gills splayed out were dark, wavy fronds that Steve couldn’t quite see properly, but that he was sure he’d never seen before. The axolotl’s tail was shorter and stubbier than most of its kind, but most glaring of all was the front left leg, which seemed to be covered by some sort of metal cast, the most advanced-looking thing that Steve had ever seen on animal or human. In fact, as he looked closer, Steve could see scarring around the shoulder of the animal, and that the metal looked more like a _prosthetic_ than anything else. Steve drew back, and the axolotl, in seeming defiance of the visual capabilities of that species, actually glared at Steve before backing up against the wall of the glass as far away from Steve as he could get. 

 

Looking around at the shattered fish tank, Steve was amazed that this little one had survived. Somehow, having one lone survivor of this tragedy seemed to be harder than to have total carnage. 

 

‘The last one left behind…’ murmured Steve, shaking his head slightly. Suddenly, the darkness at the corners of the room seemed to draw in tighter around him. Steve took his phone out of his pocket and by the scant screen light, he thought he saw the axolotl turn to scrutinise him closely. Unblinking, Steve unlocked his phone and dialled 911.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Within the tank, the soldier judged that there were no less than three different factions, status unknown. There was the posse of freshwater snails which occupied the area around the patch of green algae on the side of the tank, the tribe of little clear shrimp-like things which darted everywhere as if in constant concern, and the lone mudskipper who mostly kept to himself. None of them, the soldier privately thought, would make competent allies in a fight situation. Not that he would be much good either, he thought. After a little more searching, the soldier found to box. It seemed that the water was kept clean and fresh by being sucked through the large box in one corner. The soldier was a little wary of the box, with its humming and beeping. Operational guidelines stated that he should sweep the area for bugs and disable any transmitting devices in the vicinity, and that large black box looked suspiciously like a transmitter to him. Whatever strange force was holding him in this body shape might also have something to do with the box. Yes, the soldier decided, the box would have to go

Five long hours later, the last of the police detectives had left, urging Steve to go home and get some rest. Steve had told the story of the phone call and the house and the fish tank so many times that his brain seemed to be going fuzzy on the details, a little more slipping away each time. He had Detective Sam Wilson’s business card in his pocket and the axolotl, now in an empty jam jar with holes in the lid, in his coat pocket. Everything else that made up Erskine’s life had disappeared in clear, numbered evidence bags. 

 

Scrubbing his hand across his eyes in an attempt to wake himself up, Steve slowly crossed the road to the bus shelter. From all directions, shadows in the corners of his eyes seemed to morph into mysterious shapes, all pointing guns and knives in his direction, metal hands outstretched. Steve shook himself and tried to shove his emotions down into a jam jar smaller than that in his pocket. Mentally, he screwed the lid on tightly. It would do him no good to descend into paranoia or misery right now – the time to acknowledge his fears was at home under the blankets with the door triple-bolted, not out here in the open New York night with shadows still reaching out to grab him. 

 

Steve stepped through his front door very quickly, but then forced himself to turn slowly and shut the door with deliberate, defiant care. No ghost or shadow was going to make him feel afraid in his own home. He did lock the door with a sigh of relief, though, and bolted it top and bottom before he could relax. Perhaps it was silly to imagine that whoever had taken Erskine was right behind him all the way home, but Steve could not shake the feeling that he was being watched. That damn axolotl hadn’t helped. As soon as Steve had gotten onto the bus it had started squeaking in alarm – and that was another thing that was freaking him out – and every single time Steve had taken him out of his pocket, the axolotl had been staring dead into Steve’s face. That, in conjunction with the odd markings, hair-like respiratory appendages and high-pitched squeaks, had kept Steve on edge for the whole journey home. 

Back in his flat, Steve held up the jam-jar to the light once more. It was so strange, he thought, that such an unusual axolotl should have been chosen to be part of Abe’s study. Usually, the man was pedantic about picking test subjects which were all physically uniform in order to reduce error from individual variation, but this one – well, if it’s strange human-like markings and intelligent eyes didn’t make it unusual, the metal foreleg certainly did. In fact, if Steve looked close enough, he could almost see human hands, wavy brown hair and… but no. He was being stupid. It was late, and he was imagining things again, because there was no way that little axolotl was in fact a tiny human man. 

 

‘You’re cracking up, Steve,’ he murmured to himself, before crossing to the wide bench that held his own freshwater fish tank and tipping the axolotl in. 

 

‘Bad day today, fellas,’ Steve started, rubbing at a spot of grease on the side of his fish tank as the axolotl sank to the bottom and immediately hid underneath the replica shipwreck. As usual, the inhabitants of his fish tank listened to his worries without apparent judgement.

 

‘You would not believe this mess with Abe… not sure what I’m gonna do about that, to be honest with you. Oh don’t you look at me like that,’ he chided the large glass shrimp as it wind milled its front legs at him, ‘I had to take him in. Poor guy’s got nowhere to go, and he’s spent his whole life as a lab rat up until now. I know how that feels,’ Steve whispered conspiratorially to the new axolotl, whose flat tail hadn’t quite managed to fit inside the sunken galleon. ‘Not nice. Not nice at all.’

 

He took the sudden stream of bubbles that rose from inside the ship as the axolotl’s agreement, and carefully avoided thinking about how much he projected his own loneliness onto the occupants of his fish tank daily. 

 

‘Don’t terrorise the new guy,’ Steve admonished the snails, who had a bad habit of ganging up on anything that moved slowly enough and cornering it against the artificial rock wall. The snails slimed at him in response, with a decidedly sulky air, Steve thought. 

 

Steve straightened with a sigh, rubbing his hands along the base of his spine in an attempt to rub out the numerous knots and aches that he inevitably accumulated each day. Even though he felt like the last thing he could do was sleep, all Steve wanted was to lie in his bed and quiet his mind for a while. 

 

‘G’night fish, g’night snails. Night – new axolotl buddy,’ Steve yawned, before dragging himself off to bed. He was asleep the moment his head touched the pillow. 

 

#####

 

Steve woke the next day with a raspy throat and a head that felt full of pondweed. Just the benefits of exerting myself, he thought as he pulled himself from the warmth of his blankets. Swaying slightly, Steve grit his teeth and lunged for the door. This sudden fatigue was not unusual to him, but it certainly was unwelcome, all the more so for being the price he paid for last night’s activities. Being sick all his life had made Steve more than accustomed to fighting through the sort of setbacks that would have other people reaching for the phone and calling in sick to work. Steve, however, was made of sterner stuff than to let a little headache stop him. Besides, he’d already used up his sick leave for the quarter with that bad bout of bronchitis last month and he was going to be paying off the hospital bill for that one for a couple of years at least. 

 

Once dressed and after a few strong cups of coffee, Steve wondered over to the fish tank. The new axolotl seemed not to have moved from last night, even his tail was still in the same place. Everyone else looked calm, though, so Steve was reasonably confident that the axolotl had neither eaten nor fought with anyone else in there. Leaning over the tank, he dropped a few morsels of fish food into the water and watched as the glass shrimp and mudskippers fought over a dried pellet. 

 

‘None of that, there’s plenty of food to go around,’ Steve gently admonished, tipping a little more food in as he did so. He peered at the axolotl a little longer, trying to work out if everything was alright, before his phone alarm reminded him that he had to leave the house, like, now. Sniffling and swearing under his breath, Steve blew his nose one last time as he headed out of the door and slammed it shut behind him. 

#####

Once the door had slammed and the house seemed empty, the soldier emerged from his tactical cover. He was trying not to think too closely about the operational benefits of using a plastic fish toy as a base of operations, but, well… it was better than nothing, right? 

_Better than nothing_ meant _non-optimum,_ and _non-optimum_ meant that the voice of his training loudly denounced this choice inside his head, but for some strange reason, the soldier did not feel like he had to obey. It might have been something to do with the fact that there was no handler here to enforce his training if he did not obey, or perhaps it was that nothing in his training had prepared him for animal transformation. The tail probably had a large amount to do with it, but like so much else about his present situation, the soldier tried to put it out of his mind. Peering around the bow of the ship, the soldier determined that there were probably not going to be any enemies lurking around in here. After all, how were the snails supposed to hold guns? That thought made him feel strange inside. He opened his mouth and a stream of bubbles emerged, without him really knowing quite why or what that sound would have been if he had still had a human tongue. Weird. 

 

The soldier set about exploring his temporary holding quarters, memory quickly fitting the word fish tank into his new situation. Beyond the tank walls he could see a small room with a door at one end and a couple of dark shapes which could have been furniture. In this strange body, his colour vision and depth perception were shot to hell, and besides, it hurt his eyes to try and look into the distorted world beyond the fish tank. Another non-optimum situation. 

Within the tank, the soldier judged that there were no less than three different factions, status unknown. There was the posse of freshwater snails which occupied the area around the patch of green algae on the side of the tank, the tribe of little clear shrimp-like things which darted everywhere as if in constant concern, and the lone mudskipper who mostly kept to himself. None of them, the soldier privately thought, would make competent allies in a fight situation. Not that he would be much good either, he thought. After a little more searching, the soldier found to box. It seemed that the water was kept clean and fresh by being sucked through the large box in one corner. The soldier was a little wary of the box, with its humming and beeping. Operational guidelines stated that he should sweep the area for bugs and disable any transmitting devices in the vicinity, and that large black box looked suspiciously like a transmitter to him. Whatever strange force was holding him in this body shape might also have something to do with the box. Yes, the soldier decided, the box would have to go. 

 

Ordinarily, it would have been the work of a moment to disable a transmitter like that, but the metal arm was terrible for, well… swimming was the only word for it… up to the box. His large, paddle-like tail seemed perfect for short bursts of swimming, but controlling the direction of movement was, at the moment, proving problematic. After a few long minutes, he managed to cling to the edge of the box. The water current was much stronger up here, and the soldier was exposed. Trying to reach under the back of the casing, the soldier’s left leg and tail got caught in the mechanism at the same time as he lost his grip on the top edge of the box. Hanging in mid-water, suspended from the transmitter by one leg and his tail which were painfully stuck, he could do nothing to free himself. He was trapped, kept away from the transmitted by the force of the water current, and completely at the mercy of any enemies which might come along. The soldier was just running through training scenarios in his head – but nothing had prepared him for this!! – when from outside the tank there came an odd vibration, a sequence of little clicks that formed together into something coherent. The door, thought the solder, the front door was being unlocked. Despite all his training, the soldier panicked. The blond man would discover him, he would know that the soldier had been trying to disable the transmitter, would gloat at his failure and then it would be the chair again for him when his handlers came back to extract him. He held as still as he could, but to no avail. The blond man crossed over to the fish tank as soon as he had closed the door, and peered in. the soldier closed his eyes and waited for the punishment to come. 

 

‘Oh!’ The soldier’s hearing was nothing like it should have been, but at lease he could distinguish most human speech particles, even if this blond man did sound like he was speaking through cotton wool. 

‘You poor thing!’ the blond man continued, ‘all tangled up in the filter. How did you get yourself into this position?’ 

The soldier opened his eyes. It didn’t sound like he had been discovered by an enemy agent, in fact the man sounded almost sympathetic. In his confusion, the soldier stared straight up at the blond man, but then tensed up immediately as a giant hand came down towards him through the water. The hand made a loose cup, and slowly moved until it was supporting the soldier’s weight. Finally, some of the pain in his leg and tail eased off. The blond man continued to cup his body in one hand while the other one prised the black cover loose from the box and he could free himself. Stunned at the sudden water movement, the soldier lay in the blond man’s palm for a second too long as the man made a noise that sounded like concern and began to move his hand out of the water. Before he could do anything, the soldier was raised up and subjected to the scrutiny of a pair of wide human eyes. It might have been his new limited vision, but he thought they looked a little… unfocussed, and he had no idea what colour they were both because he couldn’t see colours and because of the swollen bags underneath which had half-closed the man’s eyes. He could feel the man’s breath on his stomach, the warmth of his palm under the soldier’s back. He lay, frozen in fear as though he were really an animal, while the man examined him. The pad of one finger came gently to poke at his tail, then brushed over his arms. The soldier could not remember the last time that he had been touched so carefully, and kept as still as possible so as not to give the man any reason to hurt him. 

 

‘You are the strangest little thing I’ve ever seen,’ whispered the man in a voice forceful enough to flatten him against the man’s palm. ‘What in the world could Abe have wanted with you?’ 

 

The man frowned for a moment, before plopping the soldier gently back into his tank. He even laid him down next to the galleon, patiently straightening his palm so that the soldier could crawl off.

 

As fast as he was able, the soldier scooted back into the safety of the sunken galleon. The mission had been a failure, he had been discovered in a compromising position – all his training shouted at him that he was for the chair again, that now was the time that his handlers would pass him over to the blank-faced scientists… and yet the new large human hadn’t hurt him, nor had he turned the soldier over to his handler. Something else within him shouted that he was safe. It was a foreign voice, buried deep inside him, and rather than the monotone voice of his handlers, this voice brought with it an odd… _memory._ A woman held him in her arms and rocked him as he cried. He had skinned his knees but here… in this woman’s arms, he felt safe. The new large human’s hand today had been as gentle and caring as those remembered arms, and now the galleon felt ever so slightly more like home. 

 

The soldier did not remember a home, not even a name, but here in the safety of the galleon, with a human who didn’t harm him to help him out of trouble, the soldier started to remember what it was like to feel safe.


	4. Chapter 4

The soldier spent the next few weeks observing the kind man. He worked out from his ramblings that the man was named ‘Steve,’ and that he worked in a lab somewhere nearby. When he heard this, the soldier became immediately suspicious, but it soon emerged that Steve was something called an ‘aquarist’ who maintained the fish tanks in the lab and did not participate in any illegal human experimentation for himself. The soldier was not quite sure where his brain had dredged up the phrases ‘aquarist’ and ‘illegal human experimentation,’ as the certainly had not been part of his training, but then, his brain was doing more and more weird shit these days. Once upon a time he would not have come up with the phrase ‘weird shit’ either. 

 

The soldier conducted as much surveillance as he was able, which between his status as fish-tank inhabitant and the persistent pain in his left shoulder, was not much. Without his handlers, the soldier was not able to access the arm’s panels to perform maintenance, but the scars around his shoulders seemed to be healing anyway. He couldn’t remember when he’d first been given the arm, only that it was a gift from Hydra and that it made him their perfect asset. Perfect damn nothin’ crossed his mind – and that was another new thing, the cracks in his loyalty towards his handlers, the suggestion of resentment, that they had taken something from him when they gave him the gift. The remembering and the arm aching and the strange new (old??) penchant for coarse language gave the soldier more drive to remember, a feedback loop like a coiled rope that brought old memories in tighter and tighter towards himself with each twist. The problem with remembering, though, was that he remembered so much. Childhood scraped knees set off memories of surgeons opening his shoulder; splashes from the surface of the tank brought to mind mountain streams and the feeling of falling; there was no filter and no hope, yet, of piecing these memories together to form a whole man. All he could do, when the jumble of memories hit him so hard he couldn’t move, was ride it out and think of feeling safe in Steve’s hands. 

 

He was currently trying to ignore the pain in his left arm as he watched Steve get up from the old couch where he sent his evenings and move slowly towards the door. Steve always moved slowly in the evenings, like all the day’s pain was stored up and let out. The soldier watched without much interest as Steve opened the door to two men in dark suits. 

Then Steve did something unexpected – he let the men into his house. The solider immediately perked up to the security threat, scooting closer to the tank wall in order to properly observe what was going on. His head hurt trying to see through water and glass, so he resolved to climb up onto the filter again to better hear what was going on. In the weeks since his first day here, he had practised climbing to the top of the filter again and again until he could swim up there and hold on without being swept off. He could even, if he strained, poke his head out of the water to hear human conversation. 

 

#####

 

Steve had just started to relax when the knock came. Behind the open door were two men in matching black suits. They flashed two shiny name badges as him, almost too quick to catch, an action they had clearly performed many times before, and introduced themselves as from the FBI. Of course, they said, they wanted to talk to him about the disappearance of Abraham Erskine. Steve let them in with a sigh and offered them a seat on the couch nearest his fish tank. 

 

‘Mr Rogers, we just have a few more questions for you,’ began the taller of the two. He was handsome, in a rugged way, with a sharp jaw and a few days’ worth of stubble. His piercing blue never once left Steve’s face, and Steve had an uncomfortable feeling that he was being studied.

 

‘As I told your colleague, please call me Steve.’

 

‘Oh? Which colleague was that?’ asked the other one, his dark eyes hooded and unreadable.

 

‘Your boss, Detective Sam Wilson, the guy who’s leading your investigation?’ Steve couldn’t put his finger on exactly what was going on here, but there was a weird vibe in the room right now, something that he had never felt while Sam was questioning him. 

 

‘Oh yes, Detective Wilson.’ The blue-eyed man shot a sharp glance at the other, who smiled tightly. 

 

‘We’d just like to go over a few more facts with you. If you don’t mind. You’d be doing your friend Abe a service.’

 

‘Is there any news of Abe?’ asked Steve carefully. He was beginning to pay attention to the warning bells in the back of his mind. 

 

‘Regrettably, we have no new leads.’ The man really did look sore at that, so Steve supposed they were trying their hardest to find Abe. 

 

‘Then I don’t understand what more I could possibly have to tell you.’ Steve supposed it was a little stupid to piss off the FBI, but then again, he always had been a little stupid. 

 

‘So he hasn’t attempted to contact you? You haven’t seen him around your place of work, for example?’

 

‘No, I haven’t.’

 

‘Did Abe mention working on a new project to you? This would have been quite recently. Any new breakthroughs, jobs or contracts?’

 

‘No, nothing like that. He was just a professor, taught the same classes every year.’ 

 

‘Did you see anything unusual at his house that night you reported him missing?’

 

‘I already told Detective Wilson everything I saw, and you can see from all the photos that he took that the whole house was full of some pretty unusual stuff.’

 

‘Yes, we should look at those photos again, Ward,’ the elder man said to the younger, with a slow blink and what Steve imagined was meant to be a friendly smile directed at his colleague. Ward, the dark-eyed man, nodded. 

 

‘So you didn’t see anyone else there at all?’ The elder man returned to questioning Steve. 

 

‘No, officer, I didn’t.’

 

‘Did you take anything from Abe’s house? Any books or files?’ asked Ward.

 

‘What? No! What the hell is that question supposed to mean?’ responded Steve angrily. Were they suggesting that he had anything to do with Abe’s disappearance? 

 

‘Calm down, Mr Rogers. What Ward meant to say’ – another intense look shot between the two men – ‘is that all of Dr Erskine’s recent work is also missing, and we are trying to find out if any of his colleagues have copies of it, that’s all.’

 

‘Look, I’m not a professor, and Abe certainly never let me look at his work. You’re better off asking at the college.’

 

‘We might just do that, Mr Rogers, thank you.’

 

‘I told you, call me Steve,’ he gritted out. Something about these two was really starting to grate on him. 

 

‘Yes,’ came the reply, although neither man used his name. The intense stare from Ward continued, and the other man was starting to creep Steve out. 

 

‘I hope you’ll excuse me, Agents, but it’s getting late and I would like to get to sleep, so perhaps if you don’t have any more questions…’ he let the sentence hang in mid-air to get his point across. Steve was not going to be intimidated by an intense stare in his own house, and he wanted these men to leave, now. 

 

‘Yes, of course,’ repeated the elder man. As they stood, he held out his hand for Steve to shake, and the light caught a black metal signet ring on the man’s right hand. There was a rush of movement and a loud splash from the fish tank, of all places, and the heads of the two agents whipped around, quick as snakes. 

 

Steve frowned at the tank, but nothing seemed out of place. When he turned away, he saw Ward was still directing the full force of his stare at the water, before the older man gave his shoulder a light push in the direction of the door. 

 

Once they were out, Steve closed the door behind them and, after a moment’s deliberation, locked it. He could not hear any footsteps walking away from his door, which made him slightly nervous. But then, he thought, his hearing had never been all that good, anyway. Walking back towards the fish tank, Steve wondered what could have caught Ward’s eye so keenly. There was certainly nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual snails and the shrimp and the… oh. Yes. The axolotl. He had taken that from Abe’s flat, hadn’t he, but that couldn’t be important could it? It was just an animal, nothing to do with Abe’s research, right? Steve thought of the metal front leg of the animal, a sense of unease sweeping down into his stomach. If the agents had been looking for this animal, then Steve was sort of glad that he had forgotten all about him. He didn’t deserve to go back into the research lab. 

Pinching his nose against a sudden headache, Steve turned away and headed to bed. He had had enough stress this evening. 

#####

The soldier had listened to the exchange between Steve and the men who called themselves Agents with growing unease, trying to focus through the stabbing pains in his left arm which were the worst they’d been in a long time. Every instinct in his body told him that they were not genuine. It was not until they shook hands and he caught the detail of the man’s ring that he realised. They were Hydra! His handlers were looking for him, perhaps had even found him!

 

Overcome with a fear as deep and old as anything he knew, the soldier dove for safety. He peeked out of the pond weed at the three men and hoped that they did not recognise him. Memories hit him like a freight train – Hydra finding his broken body in the snow, Hydra giving him the arm, cutting into him again and again until he screamed, Hydra training him to kill, strapping him into the memory-wipe chair when he questioned the orders, forcing him to obey the will of his handlers and every severe punishment that he’d ever suffered through burned brightly through his mind. He thrashed his body back and forth, trying to get those images out of his mind, but they were burning too brightly. His brain was a mess of recalled sensation, but at the centre of them all was a name that he had buried deep within himself. His name. _James Buchanan Barnes._ His fears and memories built to a crescendo as he thrashed, until all of a sudden the metal came loose from his shoulder with a sickening screech and he passed out from the pain. 

#####

Steve heard the commotion coming from the tank not ten minutes after the agents had left. It sounded like splashing – he hoped that no-one was stuck in the filter again.   
At first, nothing looked different, but then he saw it – the tiny metal arm had come loose from the axolotl’s shoulder. Stunned, Steve reached delicately into the tank, pinched it between thumb and forefinger, and drew it out. It was without a doubt an engineering marvel, overlapping plates and even articulated fingers. What use could an axolotl have for a prosthetic that was more advanced than those available for humans? Steve reached into the tank again to check on the axolotl, but it seemed like he didn’t want to be removed. He had wedged himself inside the sunken galleon and would not come out, so Steve walked the little arm over to the mantelpiece and set it down. He stared at it for another moment in complete puzzlement, then shrugged and went back to bed. He could deal with this in the morning. 

#####

The Agents were back the next evening. Steve let them in with very bad grace, keeping one hand firmly clenched around his phone in his pocket, just in case. As soon as they were in the door, Agent Ward asked Steve for a glass of water, and damn him if his mother hadn’t taught him how to behave towards guests. The other agent, the taller, greyer one, stayed in the lounge while Steve poured Ward a glass of water. When they returned, he was bending over the fish tank, smiling his intense, hawk-like smile. He straightened up and held up a phone in his hand. 

 

‘Sorry Steve, but we have to go. A call just came in.’

 

‘Thank you for the water, though,’ said Ward, handing the glass back to Steve. It was still full. 

 

The two agents marched themselves out of the door, Ward without a backwards glance. 

 

‘We’ll be in touch, don’t go anywhere,’ said the other man in lieu of a goodbye, then he too turned and walked quickly down the corridor. This time, Steve could clearly hear their footsteps as they left, and he closed the door with a frown. Had they lingered here the other night after he’d asked them to leave? 

 

Back in the lounge, Steve cast a suspicious glance around, then headed over to the fish tank. He set the full glass of water down next to it and peered in. Everything seemed normal. Huh.

 

‘Maybe I’m just getting paranoid,’ he muttered to himself. 

 

It was not until later that night that he realised the tiny metal arm was missing from his mantelpiece.


	5. Chapter 5

The soldier – James… Bucky… did not know what to think about that. The pains in his arm had, to his complete surprise, been growing pains, as underneath the metal attachment point, the nub of his shoulder had gradually re-grown itself into a brand new arm. It was as it with the removal of the metal arm had come the freeing of his mind from the last of Hydra’s shackles, for now he remembered everything. Being a soldier had been the dream of his younger, more naïve self. His first few tours, to Afghanistan and Iraq, had gone off without a hitch, and he’d been recruited as a sniper into a counter-terrorism squad. It had been high in the Alps when the fall happened – kicked off a train by an explosion and found by the very terrorists he was trying to eliminate. Hydra – the name itself sounded foul in his head. There were years of conditioning and brainwashing behind him, and uncertainty ahead. Bucky’s joy at remembering had been short-lived, however, as the Hydra agents had returned the next day. While one distracted Steve in the kitchen, the other strode to the mantelpiece and pocketed his tiny metal arm. The man then strode over to the fish tank and would have put his hand in to take Bucky too had Steve not returned at just the right moment. 

 

No, it was clear to Bucky that Steve was now in danger. The only problem was that in his current form, he was unable to protect him. The thought of Hydra taking Steve, of Hydra torturing Steve like they had done to him, made him shake with fear and rage. Bucky owed his continued freedom entirely to Steve now. He thrashed his tail and pumped his new arm as hard as he could, making it up to the top of the tank filter. Steve was home from work, and Bucky felt so much more relieved to have him safe in the house, despite the shoddy security measures. 

 

Bucky watched as Steve went through the daily rituals of toeing off his shoes and making a cup of tea before heading over to the tank. This was the part of the day that Bucky had grown to love, the part where Steve talked to him as though he were a real person, something that Hydra hadn’t done even when he was human. 

 

‘Still no sign of Abe,’ Steve grimaced, ‘and I phoned up Detective Wilson to ask about any developments. Nothing.’ 

 

Steve sighed here, and Bucky felt the longing to explain that no news was definitely good news, as had Hydra caught him, the fake agents would have stopped coming around and started shooting instead. 

 

‘But I guess it’s not all bad,’ Steve continued. ‘At least we’ve been allowed back into the lab at work after all that fumigation business. And, do you know – oh!’ Bucky squeaked in alarm as Steve’s eyes focussed in on him, sitting square on top of the filter and paying attention to every word he said. 

 

‘You look just like you can understand me!’ Steve smiled.

 

‘I can understand you!’ Bucky tried to shout, but all that came out of his mouth was the frustrated squeaking of an axolotl. 

Steve reached for him and picked him gently up in his palm. 

 

‘Your arm’s re-grown. You axolotls really are amazing, aren’t you?’

 

Bucky peeped back at him, this time in real alarm. As soon as Steve had touched him, he felt a strange burning sensation down his spine, like it was cracking open. As the sensation spread all throughout his body, he tried to yell at Steve to put him down. 

 

#####

 

Steve flinched in alarm when the axolotl started shrieking. It was the awful, fearful sound of a salamander in the flame and it chilled him to the bone. Panicked that he might be hurting the little animal by the contact of his skin, Steve tried to plunge him back into the tank but he seemed to be growing heavier by the second, twisting and shrieking in his hands and growing, growing longer and thicker and inexplicably warmer until he almost had to drop it. The little Axolotl’s fearful screaming got lower and more gravelly until it began to sound human, which Steve would have thought was crazy if he had the time to form a rational thought. The weight of the madly twisting, shrieking creature in his hand suddenly increased, accompanied by an audible cracking sound, and before he knew it, Steve was holding onto the ankle of a very buff, very naked man who had just fallen out of his hand and onto the carpet, and who was currently emitting a gravelly, pained growl. 

 

Steve stared. It was really the only thing he could do in the situation. His new Axolotl had just turned into a human. The crazy thought ran through Steve’s mind that he didn’t even have to kiss it or anything, and as he stated down at the man, eyes popping and mouth gaping, he willed himself to say something, anything, that didn’t mention kissing. 

 

‘What- what?’ Steve was having trouble getting any words out. All he could do was stare.

 

The Axolotl looked up at Steve through entirely human slate-grey eyes, his expression unreadable. He was taller and broader than Steve, with the sort of corded muscle along his shoulders and chest that only came from hard work and repetitive training. His face was delicate for such a large man, with wide-set almond eyes, a curved mouth and a large chin dimple. Despite his nakedness, the Axolotl returned Steve’s stare without blinking. Where his left shoulder met his body was cover in shiny, new skin, like that which grows after a burn. It covered his whole left arm and hand in what looked like one big sore, recently-healed injury. 

 

The Axolotl’s throat worked, but nothing came out, and something about his eyes gave Steve the impression of fear. 

That galvanised Steve’s mind to overcome the strangeness and finally talk. 

 

‘Are you my Axolotl?’ Stupid, stupid, of course this man wasn’t his. 

The Axolotl only nodded. 

 

‘And you came out of my tank?’ Again, a nod.

 

‘Can you talk?’ The Axolotl bowed his head. His left arm trembled slightly. 

 

‘I can talk,’ came the whispered reply, gravelly and deep. 

 

‘Have you been turned into a human before?’  
At that, the Axolotl looked up at him. 

 

‘I am a human. I was only an axol... axot... I was only transformed two weeks ago.’

 

Steve’s heart went out to the man. ‘You poor guy! Here, let me help you up. Let’s get you some warm clothes.’

 

Steve helped the axolotl- No, the man to his feet and showed him to the bathroom. He gave him as fluffy a towel as he could find and left him to shower. Steve wandered back into the lounge and stared over at the fish tank. He had had another human being prisoner in there for two weeks? Steve’s brain slammed back to the night Erskine disappeared, when bed found the Axolotl in a pile of human clothing. He’s thought nothing of it at the time but what if... what if the clothing and guns had belonged to this man? 

 

All of a sudden Steve felt cold. What if the man had been there, what then? Was Abe also a fish? Steve remembered the dead bodies of Abe’s fish lying around the tank and shuddered. Or perhaps something more sinister was happening? Perhaps the man in his shower was part of the reason why Abe had disappeared? 

Steve’s phone was in his hand and he was backed into a corner before he knew it. The shower shut off and Steve listened with dread to the sound if the man drying and dressing himself. When the bathroom door opened, Steve flinched. The man came through looking clean and warm, dressed in Steve's largest sweats and t-shirt, but his eyes still betrayed his fear and nerves as they swung around the room and landed in Steve. Instantly, all of Steve’s suspicion turned to anger. He would not allow this man to get away if he had something to do with Abe’s disappearance. 

 

‘How did you come to be an Axolotl?’ Steve demanded. The man, who had been standing in the doorway regarding Steve with a little wariness, immediately gulped in a large lungful of air and stumbled backwards, crumpling back into the bathroom. 

 

‘I’m sorry! I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean it! I’m so sorry,’ here the man had to stop talking as he dissolved into sobs. 

 

Taken aback, Steve froze for a moment then approached him. Steve still had his phone in his hand but he felt a little less angry now. He crouched down in front of the man and reached out a hand to his right shoulder. The man flinched slightly when Steve grasped him, but held steady. 

 

‘I won’t hurt you. Tell me what happened.’  
The man looked up at him from under his long, damp brown hair and started to talk.

#####

Bucky hadn’t known what to expect from Steve. Half of him had been waiting for Steve to call his Hydra handlers right away and have him taken back to the chair. The other half, the half that remembered Steve’s gentle hands and kind words, struggled to feel anything other than safe. 

 

‘I won’t hurt you. Tell me what happened.’ Bucky looked up at Steve in surprise. Despite all his training, some deeper instinct urges him to trust Steve, and tell him the truth. 

Bucky let out a breath and begun the story. It started with his name and where he grew up, a restless and arrogant young man who joined the army straight out of high school. He told Steve about being a sniper, about being the best and the pride in his old unit. Then, his voice trembling, he talked through the fall and his eventual capture and imprisonment. The ‘illegal human experimentation’ came next, Bucky’s brain supplying more horrific detail than he passed on to Steve. Here, he had to stop a few times and fight through the nightmarish pictures in his head. When he came to the part where he had been tasked with killing Abe, Bucky’s stomach clenched and his hands started to shake. Stuttering and breathing heavily, he managed to grit out the events of that night, culminating in him being turned into an Axolotl and coming home with Steve in a jar of water.

 

At the end of the telling, Steve just sat there, still and staring. Bucky didn’t blame him, it was a lot to take in. He bowed his head and waited for Steve to talk. 

 

‘That’s a hell of a story,’ came Steve’s deep voice. 

 

‘It’s all true. I promise. I was brainwashed, but I can promise you there’s not a word of a lie in there.’ It was the only thing he could do, tell the truth and wait with this sickening swooping in his body telling him to run, telling him to lash out, just do something. 

 

Steve pinched his nose under his glasses. ‘It’s late. I’m exhausted. You- you can take the couch for tonight.’

 

Bucky’s head snapped up, but he couldn’t detect any lies in Steve’s voice or face. 

 

‘You won’t... call my handlers?’

 

‘Who- Hydra? No. It’s late and my brain hurts and I don’t have the energy to deal with this right now. We'll talk in the morning.’

 

A few minutes later, Bucky was tucked under a heap of blankets with a cup of tea and three pillows. He supposed that if Steve really didn’t believe him he wouldn’t have got so many pillows. He watched Steve retreat into his own room, wary eyes on Bucky the whole time, and shut the door. Bucky sighed and settle in for a night of very little sleep. 

 

######

Steve sighed, and settled in for a night of very little sleep. The tale that the man – Bucky – had told him was fantastical, and if Steve hadn’t seen him transform from Axolotl to man with his own eyes, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. Steve lay in bed wrestling with himself. He had never heard such an odd story, and his first instinct was to reject everything he'd said. Over and over again in his mind, Steve went through the details of Buck’s story, and however many times he turned it over, his mind kept on coming back to one conclusion: Bucky was telling the truth. 

 

It was about 4 am after a sleepless night that Steve heard the noises. Bucky was whimpering and sobbing in his sleep, a jumble of words and noises. Steve crept out of his room and peered around at the couch. Bucky’s arms were trapped in the blankets and he seemed to be dreaming, thrashing and pulling against them. Suddenly, the blanket ripped, loud in the silence, and Bucky woke with a gasp, tumbling from the couch to the floor. Steve couldn’t watch the man cower and cry any longer. 

 

‘Bucky?’ he called out as he approached. At the sound of his voice, Bucky’s tense body sagged.

 

‘Steve. I’m sorry, I ripped your blankets. I’m so, so sorry.’

In the scant light, Bucky looked like he expected a beating for it, cowering away from Steve even though he was easily twice as powerful as him. Steve exhaled and sat down beside Bucky. A surge of protective feeling made him reach up and tuck the remaining blankets around Bucky’s slumped body. 

 

‘Everything you said really is true, isn’t it?’ Steve said. It was not a question but an affirmation. 

 

Bucky‘s head tilted very slightly towards Steve. 

 

‘Yeah,’ came the whispered reply, as though if he said if any louder Steve would be jolted into not believing him. 

 

Steve sighed. 

 

‘I’m going to call Detective Wilson,’ he said.


	6. Chapter 6

Bucky waited for Detective Wilson to arrive with sickening dread. He trusted Steve implicitly, but this was terrifying. Steve had fed him, given him tea and clothes, listened to him and believed him. At this point, Steve was the closest thing he had to a friend, and if Steve felt that Detective Wilson could be trusted, then Bucky would listen despite the Hydra training that screamed at him to kill Steve, get out of there, burn the evidence and return to his handlers. Bucky didn’t feel the old compulsion to obey any more, though. Somewhere between re-growing an arm and having a maybe-friend/ someone who didn’t want to kill him or use him, he had broken free of his conditioning and his mind was now swimming in the sunlit waters of clarity for the first time in over ten years. 

 

Clarity, though, came with its own set of problems. Although not under Hydra's thumb any more, Bucky was still very conscious of his training and brainwashing. The nameless soldier lurked at the back of his mind. He felt twitchy and restless, fighting the urge to secure the perimeter of Steve’s house and tuck the man himself into Bucky’s side to keep him safe. Bucky knew that he’d be locked away for what he had done as the tool of Hydra and would never see Steve again, a thought which bothered him more than he could admit. Steve was standing at the narrow kitchen sink, leaning on his hands with his shoulders hunched as he waited for the coffee to percolate. He was wearing a thick plaid shirt over pyjamas that looked old and threadbare, his narrow feet in fuzzy socks. Looking at him in the scant light, Bucky felt the stirrings of protectiveness deep inside him. He owed everything to Steve, his freedom and life. Steve scratched his ear under where the arm of his thick glasses rested and swiped the front of his hair away from his face. It was oddly... sweet. Wait, what?   
The doorbell rang. Bucky squared his shoulders and prepared to face the music. 

Steve answered the door while Bucky stayed at the kitchen table fighting the urge to run. From the hall, he heard Steve's voice, 

 

‘Oh! What are you doing here?’ .

 

Instantly Bucky was on alert. If it wasn’t Detective Wilson, who was at the door?   
Bucky rushed into the hall but pulled up short when he saw who was in the doorway. His old handler, Brock Rumlow, filled the doorway with his body, seeming to tower over Bucky in his mind. 

 

‘You! ‘Bucky froze in fear. Hydra had found him already! 

 

‘Agent?’ asked Steve, clearly confused. ‘I called Detective Wilson. On his private number. What are you doing here?’ The longer Steve looked at Bucky, his eyes fixed on Bucky’s face, the more Steve’s face seemed to transform. All the uncertainty was swept away leaving only anger in its wake. 

 

Rumlow, clearly figuring he’d been made, went for his gun.

 

Everything from then on happened very fast. Bucky three himself down the hall, grabbed Steve and shoved him behind himself. Rolling against the wall, before Rumlow could draw, he pushed himself and Steve into the lounge. Behind the couch, Bucky shook Steve as the smaller man gaped at him. 

 

‘Stay here! Use your phone, call Wilson again. Stay out of sight!’

 

‘Bucky, what’s going on?’

 

Bucky grimaced. ‘That’s Rumlow. He was my handler for Hydra. He’s a terrorist and a nasty piece of work. I can’t risk you getting hurt, so just- stay here.’

 

Without waiting for an answer, Bucky stood. Rumlow was waiting in the doorway, gun trained on his heart. 

 

‘I'll give you one chance to come back with me, Soldier,’ he said, his voice soft and almost kind. ‘But if you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to kill your friend.’ 

Almost. 

 

‘I'll die before I let you hurt Steve.’

 

‘That can be arranged.’

 

On instinct, Bucky ducked as Rumlow fired. Bucky feinted left but Rumlow anticipated his awkward run across the furniture. Bucky regretted the loss of his metal arm which could stop bullets, but nonetheless closed his left hand around the barrel of the gun. Rumlow fired straight through his hand and Bucky screamed in pain. He kicked at Rumlows legs and they went down together, grappling and punching. The fight was dirty, Rumlow went for Bucky’s soft groin as Bucky jabbed his fingers in Rumlows eyes. With his left hand in pain, Bucky hit viciously with his right, bringing his left hand around his face to shield it as Rumlow raked it. Bucky saw the instant that a knife slid out of its concealed pocket and swiped up his side; he pushed his injured left arm down and it took the force of the stab, splitting his new flesh from wrist to elbow. 

 

Bucky roared in pain and rolled away. He picked up the sound of Steve shout-whispering ‘Hurry, please Hurry!’ into his phone and lunged back in again, throwing Rumlow over his hip and across the room. Rumlow twisted in mid-air so that he landed on Bucky’s heap of pillows and blankets instead of the floor. As Rumlow struggled to escape the blanket, Bucky kicked out at his ribs. Rumlow barely flinched; he drew another gun, pointed it straight at Bucky, and fired. 

#####

 

Steve watched the fight with eyes as big as saucers. Detective Wilson was shouting at him to get out of the house but he couldn’t leave Bucky. He watched in horror as Rumlow shot his through the stomach and he dropped with a scream. Laughing a breathless, triumphant laugh, Rumlow straightened and pointed the gun right at Steve. 

‘Stand against the wall and put your hand on your head. I’m gonna take your friend here, the most dangerous man you’ve ever met, with me.’

 

Steve pressed the speaker button on his phone. He stood still and defiantly lifted his chin to glare at Rumlow. 

 

‘I said, move against the wall. I won’t ask you again.’

 

‘No. You move.’ Steve didn’t know where that came from, but he was very clear. He would not be intimidated by a terrorist with a gun. Rumlow took two steps forward until the barrel of the gun was pressing into Steve's forehead. 

 

‘That was a very stupid thing to do, Mr Rogers. Ultimately, pointless as hell. I’m gonna have to shoot you, and then I’m gonna take the Winter Soldier here and put him back where he belongs. With us.’

 

‘Man, shut the hell up!’ From the doorway, Detective Wilson fired two bullets into Rumlows kneecaps. He dropped with a grunt but switched to train the gun at Wilson. Steve watched as a neat hole appeared in his shoulder, followed by the sound of a gunshot from the window. Steve whipped his head around to where a red-headed woman in tactical gear was leaning through the window that she had soundlessly opened at some point during the conversation. 

 

‘Dramatic as always, Wilson,’ drawled the woman, but Steve almost didn’t hear her. He stumbled over to where Bucky lay bleeding on his carpet, a terrible red sun radiating outwards from his belly. He was still wearing Steve s pyjamas, and he noted in a detached sort of way that one of the trouser legs was more frayed than the other. 

 

‘Bucky! Bucky, hold on. Talk to me Buck!’ Steve panicked. He could hear Detective Wilson calling for an ambulance and was aware of more black-clad agents sweeping into his apartment, but only vaguely. His main focus was on Bucky’s pale face and screwed-up arm. 

 

‘Not... gonna make it, Stevie...’ Bucky whispered.

 

‘Yes you are, Buck. You are. ‘

 

‘You... you're my...’ Bucky trailed off, sliding into unconsciousness despite Steve’s pleas. 

He remembered being pulled back by the paramedics and helped away by Detective Wilson. He remembered being asked over and over what had happened, how he had, apparently, had the world’s most wanted man living in his house for two weeks, but Steve couldn’t answer. Every nerve in his senses was trained towards Bucky. The man had saved his life tonight, there was no doubt about that. After only a few short minutes, Wilson decided that Steve had had enough questioning, and whisked him out of the door. Steve went, still in a daze, even as Bucky was being resuscitated by paramedics. He was hustled into a van with SHIELD logo on the side and given blankets and tea by a very sympathetic woman named Jemma and a hovering man named Fitz. Steve turned away to watch the sirens approaching his flat as the armoured van drove away.

 

#####

 

Thirty-four days later, Steve unlocked the door to his house, stepped through the bright yellow police tape and rubbed his eyes. Behind him, Detectives Wilson and Romanov, or Sam and Natasha as he now knew them, kept a watchful eye on the street. Everything in his house looked the same, even his fish tank was still glowing as normal. The furniture had been straightened, all the bloodstains removed from the walls and floor thanks to the SHIELD cleaning crew, and Steve was finally going back to his old life. He had been in protective custody since the night of Bucky’s transformation and Rumlows attack, but finally the leaders of Hydra and as many of their henchmen as possible were in jail. 

 

‘You call if you need anything now, Steve. Anything at all, I mean it.’ Sam clapped a hand on Steve’s shoulder, looking genuinely concerned for him. 

 

‘Thanks Sam. The only thing I need is to know where Bucky is.’ It was a mantra he'd repeated all through the trial process, although the answer he got was always the same. 

 

‘He's got a lot to answer for, Steve. You know he’s got a lot of Intel that a lot of people are interested in hearing.’ 

 

‘I know, Sam. I just wish I could talk to him again, really thank him for saving my life. He’s a good guy!’

 

‘We know he is. You have to sit tight and hope that SHIELD decodes he is, too.' Natasha was always the more pragmatic of the two. 

 

‘Yeah,’ Steve sighed. ‘Guess I do.’ 

 

‘When he gets out, we’ll make sure he knows where you are.’

 

Later on, when Sam and Natasha had left, Steve sat on his couch and stared at the wall where there had been blood splatter from Bucky’s left hand. His gaze travelled to the floor where Bucky had lain and bled out. Steve sighed to himself. He knew he wouldn’t ever see Bucky again. Even if by some miracle he was allowed out of sight of SHIELD at any point in his life, there was no way he’d want to see Steve again. He’d practically kept the man prisoner in his fish tank for two weeks, he was practically as guilty as Hydra. 

 

#####

 

Life slowly resumed its steady beat. Steve went back to his job at the university, cleaning the fish tanks once a week and feeding all of the animals that passed under his hands. Guilt rose up and choked him every time he stopped for two seconds, guilt in the shape of a man with grey eyes and long brown hair. 

 

Steve was cooking a lonely dinner when a knock came at the door. Standing there, solid in a maroon Henley and dark grey jeans, his eyes shifting every time the wind blew, was Bucky. He looked like he’ll, bags under his eyes and two days of stubble on his chin, and Steve had never seen anything as wonderful in his life. Before he knew what was happening, Steve had flung himself forward into Bucky’s arms. He smelled clean and cool, completely free of fear or blood. 

 

Steve jolted backwards but still stayed in the warm circle of Bucky’s arms. For all that he'd spent over a month thinking about him, Bucky was still a stranger. Luckily, Bucky didn’t seem to think that way, he was clinging to Steve just as strongly as he was. Steve thought he felt wetness through the shoulder of his shirt, but it could have been the cold night air. 

 

‘I thought you wouldn’t want to see me again,’ whispered Bucky. 

 

‘I thought the same! Buck, I’m so sorry’

 

‘You're- what? What for?’

 

‘I kept you in my fish tank!’

 

‘Well, I was kinda a fish, so... No, Steve, it’s me who should be sorry. I ruined your life!’

 

‘You saved my life. You did, and I haven’t been able to thank you.’

 

Bucky hugged Steve even closer, and Steve felt warmer than he had in months. He tucked his head into the crook of Bucky’s neck and breathed. Bucky tucked his chin back so that the corner of his mouth brushed against Steve’s nose. It would be so easy, Steve thought, so easy, to turn his head a little more and... In the end it was Bucky who turned his head. Their lips met in a sweet, deep press that meant more than either of them would let on. Steve reeled back and looked at Bucky, astonished. What he found in Bucky s face was an equal astonishment, hope and trust to his own. 

 

‘You'd better come inside.’

**Author's Note:**

> The working title of this fic was 'Buxolotl' because I have no skill at puns, but portmanteaus are within my repertoire. Seriously, you have no idea how long I tried for an axolotl-based Stucky pun. Yell at me in the comments if you can find a better one than the incredibly weak "A Lotl Love"


End file.
